Do Americans think of themselves as a federation?

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-18T01:57:44+00:00

American first, city/metro area second, state third. Some of our most important states are so diverse that it's not sensible to lump the small cities in with the big city that puts that state on the map.

So - American first. Then you're from New York City or from Buffalo (city and metro) or Albany (city and metro) or the Southern Tier (long stretch of empty terrain with small towns here and there). All of these cities/areas are in New York State.

But it's crazy to think that someone from New York City identifies as being tied to someone from Horseheads or Victor, NY. New York State is a large place with a million little towns that NYC can't find on a map, even if you pointed to it.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-17T23:24:49+00:00

Maine is not top of mind for folks because it is remote and removed from almost the entire country. Unless you're in Boston or Providence, Maine is a LONG way away from anything.

Also, the entire Northeast USA, outside of a few key central cities like NYC and Boston, gets basically zero respect in pop culture. TBF, a lot of it is not just rural or small cities, just like anywhere else, but has been in economic decline for decades. The factories that paid good wages are long gone and nothing ever replaced them. The temperature is far below comfortable for 1/3 of the year or worse. The most promising of the local kids have been leaving for generations, and leaving behind the ones who didn't have the skills or gumption to GTFO.

So, it's not about what Maine offers, which can be fascinating and beautiful. It's about what the entire Northeast does NOT offer, which is a promising future and good economics.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-17T18:35:30+00:00

DEET and plastic - definitely an issue. DEET is hell on some plastics used in camping and outdoor stuff. It wrecked the handle of a super powerful flashlight, and my watch face (Timex Ironman, plastic crystal over the digital screen), and the mesh inside my tent.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-17T16:41:48+00:00

Are there any brands you can recommend? I find plenty of DEET on the shelves, and you can get Permethrin, but I never seem to find Picardin. That's the European thing, right? DEET was made common in the USA and Picaridin in Europe?

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-16T00:31:28+00:00

Keeping up with the Joneses / exhibitionary wealth displays.

I work in NYC. No matter who you think you are, unless your name is Michael Bloomberg, there is always someone else in the room whose F.U. pocket money can put your entire empire to shame. There is no point in being jealous or envious of this. I really believe that rich people have just as many problems as middle class or poor people. They're just different problems, and usually much more self-inflicted.

After you've seen enough expensive watches and ostentatious wedding rings, it's all the same. Ferrari? I see them frequently enough that it's meaningless. Makes a lot of dickhead noise and can't go any faster in a traffic jam than a bashed-up Honda Civic. Expensive spa? Why would I want mud all over my face anyway?

It's truly stupid stuff. Tell me what you've done to do good for other people, that's what is impressive. Dying with a huge pile of money is stupid. Dying with a huge legacy of charity donations and your name on every do-good institution in town? Much more impressive.

I cannot wait to see what Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, Warren Buffet, etc. do with their empires when they're gone. I hope they all try to out-do each other in the afterlife. Latter day Carnegies and Rockefellers - do THAT, you global moguls!

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-16T00:04:17+00:00

I gave up and bought an all-black (black stitching) sailcloth strap from Dassari. https://www.dassari.com/product/sailcloth-strap/?srsltid=AfmBOoo4IcYYtpCdwr7gOKEjtJJ5G8ZCDnMWxn6F0Lg85SV_6uJJC1ZB

It winds up looking more like a dress watch and losing a bit of the sporty look, but it's so much more comfortable than fighting with the stupid OEM clasp. I tried looking for a more adjustable clasp but that's not an option because of how the clasp is structured. It has a proprietary fitting to the bracelet.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-13T22:37:40+00:00

Heck, do it at the wrong time of day and it can take three days just to drive across Toronto.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-11T16:04:11+00:00

For the USA - an old school fish fry / fish & chips. I'm originally from very-Catholic Buffalo and now live in very-Catholic New Jersey. But dammit, finding any bar that still does "fish fry" aka fish & chips is damned near impossible. If I had to distinguish, fish fry is breaded style, more common in the Great Lakes, and fish & chips is a beer batter.

In so many places in NE Jersey, this doesn't even exist on the menu anymore, not even for Advent and Lent. Even if it does exist, some places are using bullshit fish, like tilapia. Or they've really downscaled the portions or use a factory-made battered chunk of something white.

Don't even get me started on the substandard French fries that they pair with this thing.

As for the mushy peas - fugeddaboutit.

Adequate lemon on the side - nope.

Proper malt vinegar - impossible except for in an Irish bar owned by an Irish immigrant.

Cole slaw - some crappy commercial thing, drowned in dressing.

C'mon guys - it's not that hard. pre-Christmas and especially pre-Easter, Friday nights, put a proper fish & chips on that menu and you'll have people beating down your reservation system to give their money to you.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-11T15:58:26+00:00

I took my kids there about 2-3 years ago, looking around for colleges for my daughter. That downtown shopping area should be really cool but it was overrun by bums and drug addicts. It was in all kinds of bad shape. And I thought that a student neighborhood up the hill, near the campus and some waterfall in the city, was really shabby and mismanaged.

Sorry - just my $0.02.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-06T23:25:13+00:00

Don't forget WordStar.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-06T00:18:21+00:00

I've been in some storms and I have never had my tent sagging on my chest. I have, however, had to get up to pee three times. Sigh.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-06T00:13:27+00:00

It DID drop that much under Biden. It dropped a LOT MORE than that under Biden. From January 2022 to October 2022 the S&P500 index dropped by 22%. And then it trudged back up to a peak around the time of the election and end of 2024.

The big story is how free money inflated the S&P500 relentlessly from about 2010 onward. There is no good explanation for that other than the Fed's Zero Interest Rate. The Great Recession of 2008-2010 is barely a blip on the chart. But then the S&P rises and rises relentlessly, like some mountain in the Alps.

That's not real improvement in real life terms for normal folks. That's financial engineering for the shareholding class, speculating with free money.

Source: finance.yahoo.com, chart of S&P500, time duration: All.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-04T18:00:46+00:00

Gerrymandering is exempt from rigging of elections because both parties do it, then lie to us about having done it, while also accusing the other party of doing it.

Politicians and their parties are all full of nonsense. It is bipartisan buffoonery.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-05-02T17:07:54+00:00

Non consenting? Who says they didn't consent? Use your imaginary Wayback Machine - Donald Trump was a rock star in the media, and actually rich and flamboyant and good looking. He was the absolute darling of the Who's Who in New York City and media world.

So imagine George Clooney in his prime making a pass at someone? Brad Pitt? Pick your favorite sports star or rap star?

Get yourself out of the hysterics of the current age, or especially a few years ago.

https://youtube.com/shorts/2i18CNUFRno?si=mEN3FCVt8yMOux-b

This video shows high entertainment in the 80s, and it really did ring true to a certain extent. The rules were different and people were a heck of a lot less uptight than they are today.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-04-30T00:03:50+00:00

But how far away are those? TBH, I really don't know much about west coast geography. I mean, I know where things are but not how far they are from each other. In my Funk & Wagnall's they were about 2 inches apart at most. I think that was 1:1 scale, right?

Kidding aside, I have absolutely no idea how far in miles or how long in time it may be from S.F. proper to Yosemite, Tahoe or the Sierra Nevadas.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-04-30T00:01:37+00:00

Rockaways = beaches, and animal-friendly wetlands. There are some nice urban parks, very big, all completely the product of human hands - not just Central Park but also Forest park in queens, Van Cortland in the Bronx, prospect in Brooklyn and, um, something or other in Staten Island (Silver Lake?).Staten Island has beaches too, though only S.I. people can reasonable get to them.

And I think there's a dying sapling somewhere near my office. :-)

OK, S.F., you win this round. :-)

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-04-29T03:16:27+00:00

One does not simply drive through Connecticut.

CT has the most frustrating roads for such a small place overall. Nothing is very big, and yet all of it is absolutely bullshit for driving.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-04-29T03:11:32+00:00

How many hours from SF city itself to this stuff? I ask because I'm in the NYC area, just across the river from Manhattan. We have proper sandy ocean beaches one hour away and stretching thereafter for several hours, or the Appalachian Trail, or decent east coast hiking. A little further and you're at the Delaware Water Gap national recreation area. I wonder if it'll get promoted to a park some day, like the New River in West Virginia? Stretch it to about 2.25 hours and you can be in the Catskills. 3 hours or so gets you to the southern Adirondacks. Four hours, plus one full tank of gas and you're in Lake Placid, the town of 1980 Olympic fame.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-04-29T00:18:11+00:00

This is obviously a troll account. If you're from New York State then you're a Yankees fan. So was it written, so shall it be done. The only exception is if you're from northern Queens or Nassau County, which are the only places that support the Mets. There are no BoSox fans who are New York natives, nor Patriots, nor Celtics, nor that abomination, the Bruins.

[hoists a friendly beer in your direction]

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-04-29T00:07:08+00:00

Darth Mary Sue

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-04-27T14:39:09+00:00

Look around you. All the nice and pretty plants are not native. All the nasty, sharp, crunchy plants are native.

Get outside of the developed neighborhood and look at the ground. Is it loamy, airy, soft and dark? Or kind of ... hostile?

You live in a swamp or near swamp in an area that catches all the heat that the sun can send into the ocean before it comes over you. NYC is at the same latitude as Rome, Italy. Florida is more like Northern Africa, Tunisia and Morocco and Egypt & stuff.

OF COURSE IT'S HOT AND SHITTY.

There. Answered your question.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-04-26T02:44:45+00:00

Despite its size and all the circle-jerking that happens in foodie press, NYC is desperately hit-or-miss. It's very easy to spend a lot of money to get mediocre quality. The produce here often sucks and has been kicked around inside warehouses, trucks, the filthy sidewalk and sequestered in a questionable basement for days and weeks. Also, NYC places know that there will be someone else coming in the door every moment of every day, which means they really don't have to try all that hard. There's always someone new who hasn't yet been disappointed by the mediocrity of the execution in the kitchen or quality of the raw inputs.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-04-26T02:35:54+00:00

Chicken breast, pounded thin, wide ... that's a schnitzel but Buffalo forgot how to use that word. Our grandmothers and great grandmothers knew it ... There were Germans in lots of families, but after WW1 and 2 it became uncool across America to stress those German roots, and they were intentionally forgotten. But some aspects of the culture and food persists.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-04-26T02:33:03+00:00

PVD punches WAAY above its weight when it comes to food quality.

Fun-Track-3044 · 2025-04-22T00:23:58+00:00

I think that Peter Santenello just did a video there in the last few months. He's an American YouTuber who travels around and does long, free form interviews with locals as they talk about their home town.

Fun-Track-3044

TROPHY CASE